Generalizing End-To-End Autonomous Driving In Real-World Environments Using Zero-Shot LLMs

Traditional autonomous driving methods adopt a modular design, decomposing tasks into sub-tasks. In contrast, end-to-end autonomous driving directly outputs actions from raw sensor data, avoiding error accumulation. However, training an end-to-end model requires a comprehensive dataset; otherwise, the model exhibits poor generalization capabilities. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been applied to enhance the generalization capabilities of end-to-end driving models. Most studies explore LLMs in an open-loop manner, where the output actions are compared to those of experts without direct feedback from the real world, while others examine closed-loop results only in simulations. This paper proposes an efficient architecture that integrates multimodal LLMs into end-to-end driving models operating in closed-loop settings in real-world environments. In our architecture, the LLM periodically processes raw sensor data to generate high-level driving instructions, effectively guiding the end-to-end model, even at a slower rate than the raw sensor data. This architecture relaxes the trade-off between the latency and inference quality of the LLM. It also allows us to choose from a wide variety of LLMs to improve high-level driving instructions and minimize fine-tuning costs. Consequently, our architecture reduces data collection requirements because the LLMs do not directly output actions; we only need to train a simple imitation learning model to output actions. In our experiments, the training data for the end-to-end model in a real-world environment consists of only simple obstacle configurations with one traffic cone, while the test environment is more complex and contains multiple obstacles placed in various positions. Experiments show that the proposed architecture enhances the generalization capabilities of the end-to-end model even without fine-tuning the LLM.